Black Locust Letters (3 page)

Betty gripped the dustpan.

“
If
you saw something, say something. James Legrand is taking
inquiries, so please help out and keep our communities safe. Once
again, that was an incident at Sunny Glenn this afternoon. If you
saw something, ask for James Legrand at the Sheriff’s office. Now,
for local news...”

Numb, Betty reached forward with a shaking hand and clicked
the radio off. She grabbed for her stool, but her hand missed it,
so she let herself sink to the floor. Her ears buzzed, as though
she still heard static coming through the radio, but one thing rang
through her ears.

Slim
was on the case.

She
knew she should say what she saw—but what if she did? What had she
seen? A ring of crows. Heard crows squawking. Saw them leap onto
it. She couldn't tell their number or what had been said. There was
no way to identify them, except perhaps for the man who chased her,
but even so, she couldn't recall his face, just the panic of
running. The only thing her information would confirm was that
crows were involved. And if you saw something done by crows, you
pretended not to have seen it.

Supposing she did seek out the Sheriff, would she come to
regret it by midnight? Betty put a finger to the pulse in her neck,
tried to count it as a way to settle her stomach. That was why they
had Slim Legrand on the case: To keep informants safe. If it was
anyone but him, she might have done it. She might have said what
she saw. But she couldn't say, not if it brought her back into
contact with him, and by extension through him, back to her
father.

Betty swallowed hard and climbed up off the floor. She
wouldn't do anything differently. She'd pretend that nothing
strange had happened. That was just how it would have to
be.

But
she couldn't sleep that night. By 10:55, she was in her dressing
gown and her teeth were brushed, her hair in plaits so she would
have waves in the morning, but she couldn't sleep, not even when 11
found her with a spotless house and bogey angry at her disturbing
his nightly romping. She turned the radio back on again, rolling
the dials to slide the bar so she could listen to Tango Lima Romeo.
Listening to Alpha Bravo Charlie had been a mistake, had brought
back memories of the horrors of realizing that what she wrote could
get people killed.

Richard Welch's soothing croak popped against the speakers,
making her smile despite herself. “...and remember that when you do
interview for a place at the Police, you need to first make an
appointment with a street magician. Ask him to teach you to hide
doughnuts up those newly-tailored sleeves, and to reveal his
secrets of the sly pass. We all know the way to the piggie's heart
is to palm them a well-wrapped bismark.”

Betty snickered. Welch was perhaps the only radio host who
could get away with poking fun at the Council and make them laugh
while he did it. Well, all but a few curmudgeons, like her
father.

“
And
now for the weather. Clouds will not be present tonight, as the
Council did not pay its water bill. However, the moon has decided
to grace us with her presence to cast some light through the dark.
Temperature is mild, without a sign of any frosts on this night, so
your poppies will be standing strong come morning.”

Poppies were what they planted on contaminated war fields.
Betty wondered if Welch had mentioned them intentionally. She shook
her head firmly. Come off it Betty, one surprise encounter, and now
you're seeing wave talkers everywhere.

Her
hands shook as she made them work on her crochet again. The
repetitive action soothed her nerves, and soon she was settled
enough to begin to drop off. As she smothered the last light and
reached to turn off Welch, he said, “As we near the witching hour,
those of you working the night shift will be taking a drag, eating
a snack, or munching on your granna's sticky caramel walnut buns.
Oh you nutters, you only wish you had my lunch. Pity that our sink
no longer drips, actually, it means I'll have to get the handles
dirty. They fixed my leaky faucet earlier today, and I have to say,
I'm almost missing the silly thing.”

Betty stared into the darkness, waiting for her eyes to
adjust. There had not been a leaky faucet at the station. There was
only one sink, and the thing scarcely put out enough water to get
the hands wet on full blast. She jabbed the radio off so roughly
that the button didn't press, and she heard Welch go prattling off
on a commentary about his granna's secret caramel recipe, which he
wouldn't share, just wanted to make everyone else
jealous.

Betty felt her way into bed, arranging the covers to fit
against her body. It's just fictional commentary to make people
laugh. Richard is like that. Then she sighed, blinking into the
darkness. She tugged a curtain open a bit to let the light in, but
outside, there was not even a sliver of the moon. Just the empty,
star-prickled night sky, cold and dark and clear.

Four
and a half hours later, she was blinking in the station's harsh
lighting, reading over the bulletin for the morning. Several things
she saw were a repeat of Welch's show, like the actual weather
forecast, a reminder of key events like the building of a new dog
park on the corner of Whissemton Road and Venice Drive, and the
upcoming School Board meeting. To Betty's surprise when she went to
fill her cup, the sink had been fixed and it flowed in one perfect
and steady stream with aeration, the way a sink should
flow.

Betty would have consciously made an effort to keep her
hosting rather dry this morning, except that a night of tossing and
turning, a night of remembering code phrases from Alpha, had
completely ruined whatever creative spark she might have resisted
imbuing into the show. Her head ached something terrible, and her
mouth was dry, so she made heavy use of the coffee in the station,
coffee which very well might have been mud from the garden. But
this morning, she didn't care. She just needed something to put a
spring in her step and to stem off the impending pounding behind
her eyes.

What
actually happened was her heart raced and she felt even more
strung-out than ever before. She said her bulletin, she made some
polite comments about the weather and a brief mention of wanting to
go for a nice walk through the leaves, and bit by bit, she made it
from one commercial break to the next, then to songs, then to a
repeat of the key points, and news on the hour. First one hour,
then the next, and the next, and the next. She relaxed as the
coffee wore off and she fell into a routine so by the time she
signed off, she could almost imagine that everything was the way
that it was every other day of her life since she had come into her
position.

Still nervous of taking to the streets, Betty took her time
eating a sandwich and salad while the day hosts entered. She didn't
know if they were lucky or not, to have someone to co-host with
them. Betty and Richard did their shows alone, and at times she
wished that she had someone who could correct her when she
misspoke, or someone who she could banter with. Having everyone
listening solely to her was an intimate experience. She learned to
pretend that she was speaking to one listener, and one listener
only. She pretended he was a man, the one she could look at over a
coffee cup and comment about the banal trivialities of life with,
the one that she could share her triumphs with and someone she
could trust and confide in.

She
pretended that she had this person as a listener because there was
no one in real life that she dared to trust like that. Even if she
did have someone, she would worry after their safety constantly.
Betty knew her father watched her. She knew Slim watched her. For
that matter, the Sheriff seemed to drive up and down her street an
awful lot. At least no one had been about her windows or
doors.

“
Betty.”

She
yelped. Liza stood in the doorway, giving her a startled
expression. Liza, unlike Betty, was whiskey in a teacup. She had
limbs like bone china and painted green eyes and red hair, and a
way of speaking and moving as abrupt as a coiled
rattler.

“
Sorry, I'm a little jumpy today. Rough night,” Betty
said.

Liza
nodded. “Boss man wants to see you. I told him to wait until you
were done with your food, and you've been staring at the wall for
ten minutes.”

“
Oh.” Betty stood and moved.

Down
the hallway by five doors past the recording studio, where Emma and
Joe were already going through their greetings, Betty knocked on
her boss's door.

“
Enter.”

Mr.
Gresley sat stretching his neck behind the desk, a metal table with
papers cluttering it. It was a temporary solution until he got
something which wasn't military surplus. He'd been waiting for
years, and would be waiting for years more. She stared at him,
trying to see something in those brown eyes that would suggest he
was a Never Were sympathizer, but he looked, as always, like an
almost-retired grump who had forgotten to take his codfish liver
oil.

“
Liza said you wanted to see me?” Betty asked.

“
Here,” he grabbed a manilla envelope, one of the large
rectangular ones without a label, and held it out for her. Betty
took it and looked inside, seeing what looked like a wood plank.
“It's your invitation to the Pixie Carnival thing that's being held
in the forest.”

“
The
Autumn Moon Festival?” Betty asked, to clarify, which she knew
would annoy him. It did.

“
Hrm. Yes. That thing. I want you to go represent
TLR.”

He
did that a lot, used elementary school ways of pronouncing the
letters, but Betty had never called him out on it. Today she
scarcely stopped herself in time. “I thought Thomas was
going?”

Mr.
Gresley blinked. He swished some tobacco from one cheek to the
other. “He was.”

She
waited for him to elaborate, but he didn't, so she said, “And why
isn't he still?”

“
He's no longer with us.”

What
did Mr. Gresley mean by that? Had he transferred to a sister
station, got fed up with Mr. Gresley's coarse manners and refusal
to obey the regulations and quit, or was there a more sinister
undertone to it all?

Mr.
Gresley spat into a small blue flowerpot which he kept by his desk
and emptied when it got to smelling horrid. Today it was pretty
clean. “You're next up. So off with you, unless you're going to say
you're scared to go.”

“
No,” Betty said. “I'd be glad to go.”

He
thought women needed to cook and clean, and maybe teach children.
He certainly didn't understand why Betty hogged a whole house to
herself, or why she worked, so he gave her what he called the Shit
Shift.

So
Betty would go, to prove to him once more that she was every bit as
capable as the men in the station. And perhaps, to have a bit of
fun. Her mind involuntarily went to Clarkin's face and she forbade
herself from hoping she would meet him again.

At
the bus stop, a doppelganger noticed her long face. She didn't see
anyone else around other than the blue-coated policeman swinging
his hat at a small bird swooping down at him time and
again.

Betty had talked with this doppelganger before; or perhaps it
was a different one. They all looked the same—well, the same to the
person observing them, at least. They look like your shadow. They
sound the same. And they listen. Though what they say back, if
anything, changes from time to time.

This
one said nothing, and that was strangely comforting. Then the
will-o-the-wisps arrived on time five minutes later. Betty stepped
into the center of the lights, they spun, and she went back
home.

The
police officer had somehow beat her home. As she passed, he spoke
to a green man in a tree, “I don't care if you are guarding the
apples. You are giving the little one quite the scare at night. You
need to move.”

He
was too loud to hear a whispered reply about gremlins. Betty could
only shake her head. The policeman was a new transfer to Sunny
Glenn, presumably from near the Rift, and would soon learn the
Never Were territories or meet his end with the fairies of the
market.

The
hospital glided into view, each tick of a leaf in her bike spokes
marking another rotation nearer and nearer. Despite the frosty
touch of autumn air, Betty sweated. She would be nervous, wondering
what she'd say so she wouldn't attract attention to her
investigation, except the ride had made her too tired for worrying.
She knew the hospital nurses, besides.

For
whatever reason, the hospital had been built from an old
tuberculosis sanatorium design, though the nature of Sanctuary had
transformed its rectangular walls into soft curtains of hops and
doorways into climate defying wisteria. Once concrete steps were
now shelves of slate beneath Betty's feet, and a nurse came forward
to talk.

“
Betty, come in. I have a nice steeping of willow and
echinacea which would be perfect after your exercise. How are
things, what is new, and all of the usual questions?”

Gertrude, a slump-shouldered woman which time had turned into
a humpback, had been nursing since Sanctuary was still called Area
71, and she'd keep on nursing until the day she could no longer
hobble from room to room. The other nurses were keen to leave Betty
sitting in the sun room with Gertrude, and brought Betty the best
of puddings and gelatin to entice her to stay as long as possible.
Betty had worried she would be conspicuous, but once Gertrude's
guest, any strange question she asked was immediately lost in the
flood of conversation issuing from Gertrude like a bursting
dam.